Get Your La Clarine Farm 2010 Mourvedre Here

The following is the initial offer from La Clarine Farm for their 2010 Mourvedre. Their 2009 Mourvedre was probably one of my favorite wines of 2011. Certainly my favorite producer/wine from California for 2011. So here is the offer from Hank Beckmeyer, get it, just leave some for me too:

2010 certainly could be called a challenging vintage. After a cold winter with more than average snowfalls (including 13” overnight on Dec 7, 2009), Springtime brought us more cold and wet. And snow! 4” on March 31st (right during budbreak) and then snow, sleet and frost on May 11th, which severely affected flowering in the Tempranillo at our home vineyard. Good times…Then, summer was hardly better. Cool weather was perfect for powdery mildew, which particularly attacked the already damaged tempranillo, pretty much insuring we’d hardly get a crop from those vines. Other, later blooming varieties, like tannat and mourvedre, weathered the weather much better. And, just when we thought things, weather-wise, had stabilized, a big heat spike late in the summer caused quite a bit of sunburn on clusters not used to such intensity of light and heat.

But we soldered on. And, luckily, ended up with some pretty stunning wines. Ripeness was close to what would be considered “normal” (alcohols ended up in the low 14s on nearly everything), and acidities remained high.

Our new release is the 2010 “cedarville” mourvedre. It exhibited extraordinary perfume right out of the fermenter, with moderate tannins and perfect acidity. The wine has been beautiful, a joy to drink, from very early on, and I decided to bottle the wine “early” to capture as much of that beauty as possible.

Gorgeous aromas of red fruits, flowers and earth combine with fresh plum and spice flavors and a sleek, smooth finish with plenty of freshness. I’ve joked to some that it’s my take on burgundy, but those aromas and flavors really have more to do with the vintage and the organic farming methods of the folks at Cedarville than any of my insignificant contributions to the wine’s fermentation (heck, all I did was stomp on the grapes!).

If you are interested in how much finesse and nuance a red from the Sierra Foothills can show, try this wine. It’s already wonderful now, and I cannot wait to see how it develops.